A small book bound in leather but sized to fit in an overcoat pocket, The Alembic and the Star is just under a century old, relatively young for an alchemical treatise. It was first published in 1933 in French, but has been translated into English fairly quickly, though every copy remains hand made with the embossed leather cover and silver edged pages. Inside are instructions, couched in bizarre, symbolic language of an imagined trip from the Earth to the Pole Star, for extracting the true essence of an object, or, more disturbingly, a human being. A close read will make it clear though that the only human being it will work on is the user, others cannot be used in this way.